Improvement of low-temperature sintered ink containing nano-Ag for ink-jet printing of conductive structures on flexible substrates

The ink-jet printing is a noncontact technique for production electrically conductive structures, also on flexible substrates. The greatest challenge is the conductive material for printing - the ink, because it influences the parameters of printed structures. The structures are nonconductive just after the printing and to obtain good electrical conductivity, they need an additional energy, mainly supplied during a heating process. Our aim is to produce the ink containing silver particles with the size dimension at the level of tens of nanometers without the nano-Ag particles aggregation and sedimentation phenomenon, which can be used for ink-jet printing on a cheap, flexible substrates with thermal resistance not higher than 150 oC. Additionally the ink can be improved by proper choice of nano-Ag manufacture process. It was done by the planning the experiment (Design of Experiment) and analysis of variance (ANOVA).